ModPo 2013 #69 Emerging From Memory and Fragmentation: On Magee's "Pledge" and "My Angie Dickinson"

Image from brucesmideastsoundbites.blogspot.com.

Angie Dickinson Google Image search results

Read an excerpt from Michael Magee's "Pledge" here.
Read an excerpt from Michael Magee's "My Angie Dickinson" here.
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It was a pleasure to read "Pledge" and the different ways it could be written using homophonic translation. I agree that so much of what we memorize gets taken for granted. Yes, it is committed to memory but no, not really understood. "Pledge" is a call to return to the original text and see it side by side with the scrambled homophonic text to renew what it really stands for.

We saw the term "indivisible" in "In A Restless World Like This Is" by Charles Bernstein used in a different context but also referencing the pledge of allegiance. The pledge of allegiance is a piece of text that has not been changed over centuries and has become both a fundamental text and a text robbed of meaning from repetition.

I appreciate the exercise. I also looked up the equivalent of the pledge of allegiance for the Philippines and I realized that it changed over time. I don't know who changed it and why it needed to be changed at all if it is an essential or fundamental text. Or are we on to something, knowing that language is a living organism? In the future, will there even be a need to memorize anything?

I think (whether memorizing is a good thing or not) that we need to examine the texts that we are socialized to memorize. It is worth doing for the sake of cultivating a thinking (rather than a programmed) mind.
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"My Angie Dickinson" was partly hilarious and partly bewildering. The ingredients: 1) Emily Dickinson's prosody and form (the dashes, the capitalizations, the turns), 2) Angie Dickinson's pop culture content (and thus "hooker," "pornography" and "dialogue" enter the text), 3) Google search - the means of getting the content.

From the work we get surprises like "Orbmaster: creates orbs" and "from fireballs to PB&J." Emily Dickinson transformed into pop culture!

From the video discussion, I saw that this work was an "attempt, with the conceptual mode, to reawaken that surprise and shock, which we've forgotten, when we look at Dickinson's work." While we can read "My Angie Dickinson" on its own, it is a referential text, pointing towards the work of Emily Dickinson. It is an attempt, once more (!) to make something new. It is, at once, a new and derived work as well as an homage to Emily Dickinson.

Coming from a Filipino, 2013 perspective: I am in the middle of a very potent and confused soup. Emily Dickinson (the original) and "My Emily Dickinson" (Howe) and "My Angie Dickinson" (Magee) are all cultural markers in a colonial path. I have a very Western, somehow secondhand, upbringing and education. I am still making sense of how this all plays a part of my continuing education and the way I encounter language. I live in a fragmented world and navigating all these Dickinsons makes me look inward...to find my own fragmented self.

ModPo 2013 #39 The Disappointed Voyeur: On Kennedy's "Nude Descending a Staircase"

Image from http://www.invisiblebooks.com/Duchamp.htm

Nude Descending a Staircase
BY X J KENNEDY

Toe after toe, a snowing flesh,
a gold of lemon, root and rind,
she sifts in sunlight down the stairs
with nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
a constant thresh of thigh on thigh;
her lips imprint the swinging air
that parts to let her parts go by.
 
One-woman waterfall, she wears
her slow descent like a long cape
and pausing on the final stair,
collects her motions into shape.

© 1985 by X. J. Kennedy. Used by permission of the author.
Source: Poetry (January 1960).
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Uncannily, except for the judgement of the nude as "empty-headed," the poem pretty much depicts Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase: its fragmentation, its discordance in an attempt to portray motion.

It was pointed out during the video discussion that Kennedy's poem was an argument for a "return to normalcy" (traditional, recognizable poetry?) and a rejection of the fragmentation of modernism. It was also argued that his satire falls flat because he ends up satirizing the object of the poem (which is offensive, to say the least!). I agree.

But I can also understand where Kennedy is coming from. Like a Fragonnard waiting beneath the bannister, instead of being greeted with something sensual, the speaker is greeted with "parts." A disappointed voyeur! He might be saying that this fragmentation has reduced the woman into pieces of herself, losing her humanity and any thought that might have been on her mind. It might be a critique of the almost surgical dismemberment of what was once recognizable. At the end of the poem, the speaker collects the woman for us, the readers, "into (one) shape."

In terms of aesthetic, I would rather explore than go back to a "safe" and recognizable form. Well, that's just me. I can appreciate that form, for sure, but I want to seek out a voice that comes from its age and circumstances, its questions and experiences of the world.

ModPo 2013 #28 Circus, my very own Dadaist poem: On Tzara's "To make a Dadaist poem"

Tristan Tzara  from "Dada Manifesto on Feeble & Bitter Love"
Translated from the original French by Barbara Wright

To make a Dadaist poem:

"Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are--an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd."
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The YouTube instructions were particularly hilarious, especially with the mystical background music. While it sounds funny to me, I imagine that it was an earnest attempt by Tzara to define a new kind of poetry, a poetry stripped of subjectivity, a poetry determined purely by chance. I liked how this particular set of instructions were compared to Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain," an overturned urinal set in a museum. The first question one might ask is: Is this poetry? Is this art? I think both pieces are about questioning what art is in the first place, questioning its assumptions and challenging traditional notions.

I was very tempted to fulfill on the instructions and construct my own Dadaist poem. But given current advances in technology, I decided to look up a Dada poem generator. I found one. Here's the link: http://www.poemofquotes.com/tools/dada.php. I took one news item from a popular local news portal and here is the resulting poem:

Image generated by a newspaper clipping generator.

barrel mastermind funds. is assist
the pork Napoles Executive Arroyo funds. Fund
accused of P337 Malampaya Justice
5 filed barrel accused and the rehabilitation
Executive release in an Fund
the mastermind Mario issued Leila days requests

Amazing! I love it. It turns the news of the day, the circus of pork barrel funds and corruption that riddles all houses of our Philippine government, into a mishmash of words that are circulating day and night in our national consciousness. I appreciated the discussion on how the Dadaists were subverting the headlines of the day by using the method, fragmenting all narrative in a world that was fragmented after World War 1. I see this fragmentation once again in the daily news: the exposure of graft and corruption and the endless pointing of fingers among those in power.

From the random generation of words, there is a composition of the national subconscious that is forming. A composition of our times made up of the words: mastermind, funds, rehabilitation, executive, accused. And what magic put Malampaya (one of the biggest scams by those in power) right beside the word Justice? The magic of chance operations. Let me put a special touch to my Dadaist poem by giving it a title: Circus. A circus of words. A circle of words. A ring of masterminds. And lost in the middle of everything is Justice. Does it mean anything anymore?

While I wouldn't create any more Dadaist poems, I appreciate the impulse behind the Dadaist movement.